AMD Sends Out Patches For Enabling New Graphics IP Blocks (NBIO 7.9, GMC 9.4.3)

AMD on Friday sent out new patches for enabling some new graphics IP "blocks" as part of their block-by-block enablement strategy they've been using to introduce new GPU support to their Linux graphics stack by focusing on smaller patch series with versioned parts of the GPU rather than big monolithic patch series with colorful fishy codenames.

With the AMD Radeon RX 7900 series already in good shape along with other RDNA3 code likely associated to other upcoming Radeon RX 7000 series graphics processors, you may be wondering what's next... The patch series sent out on Friday are for the NBIO 7.9 and GMC 9.4.3 hardware blocks. When they begin sending out such patch series, additional enablement patches usually follow closely over the course of the following days/weeks.

With this GPU IP block enablement approach, it's difficult to determine what exactly this new enablement is for from a product perspective. Though in the case of enabling the Graphics Memory Controller 9.4.3 / GC 9.4.3 is some indication. The latest RDNA3 GPUs have GMC 11.x while GMC 9 with GFX9 has been back for their CDNA architecture... In reference to the AMD Instinct MI300 we've seen GFX940 and this Graphics Memory Controller 9.4.3 is likely in turn related to some additional CDNA/MI300-related accelerator hardware. For MI300 at large they've already been working on the open-source Linux driver support going back to last year.

With the new version enablement they continue to be header-happy with the GMC 9.4.3 enablement being some 67.9k lines of new code, largely in the form of AMD's auto-generated header files. NBIO 7.9 is another 49.3k lines, again mostly header files.

We'll see what more patches come in the days/weeks ahead but it's good seeing AMD continuing to work on new hardware enablement pre-launch so that ideally by the time their new products are shipping there is good out-of-the-box support in the mainline Linux kernel.